CEO Early-life Natural Disaster Experience and Corporate ESG Performance

This dataset combines CEO demographic information, natural disaster records, ESG ratings, and firm-level financial and governance variables. CEO information is obtained primarily from the China Stock Market & Accounting Research (CSMAR) database and supplemented by WIND database, the Chinese Research Data Services Platform (CNRDS), and the China Securities Information Platform (CNINF), along with manual verification using Python-based web searches. Natural disaster events—defined as incidents causing more than ten deaths—are obtained from the Emergency Events Database (EM-DAT), the National Institute of Natural Hazards, the Global Disaster Data Platform, and the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, and matched to CEOs’ early-life locations. Corporate ESG performance is measured using the Huazheng ESG Ratings constructed by Sino-Securities Index Information Service (Shanghai) Co., Ltd. Financial and governance data are drawn from the CSMAR database. After excluding financial firms, special treatment firms, and firms with missing data, our final sample consists of 1,111 unique CEOs and 4,968 firm-year observations from 2009 to 2023.